Scattered Pearls Read online

  When I told Shakoor about the work I had been doing at Helicopter Sazi, he said I should try to find a job as a programmer in Melbourne. ‘Every company in Melbourne wants a programmer,’ he said.

  He showed me how to search for jobs in the newspaper. Reza objected at this point, saying he did not want his wife to work. However, although he was looking at the newspaper all the time himself, he did not seem to be looking for work. I assumed he would soon return to university to finish his doctorate, so I continued my job search. We would need money coming in as soon as possible, and if there is one thing I learnt from Shariati’s books and my mother, it was that I needed to take responsibility for helping myself and for helping others.

  While I waited to see if I got any interviews, Reza and I took a train one day to see the Preston Mosque, one of the most significant mosques in Victoria. As I was still reading Shariati at the time I was interested to see it, and while there I would ask God to prevent me from being ignorant, and to help change me from what I was to what I should be. Inspired by Shariati, still in the back of my mind was the idea of studying sociology.

  On the way back from this trip Reza suggested we open a joint bank account and put $200 in it as a way of starting some savings. This was good, I thought. It was the first time he had shown some thought of planning for the future.

  Another time we visited Latrobe University, where Reza said he had been studying. Even with my naive mind I realised after that visit that Reza had not studied – and would not study – chemistry there. He was unclear about navigating the public transport routes on the way there, and he did not know his way around the campus at all. I tried to raise this with him gently.

  ‘By the way, you said to me that you would be a doctor in chemistry in 18 months.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I don’t think you lied, but I don’t think you told the truth either.’

  He didn’t answer me. The subject was never raised again, though I did stop referring to him as ‘Doctor’ from this time. (He became ‘my husband’ as I adopted my mother’s unusual trait of never calling or referring to my spouse by his own name.)

  In reality, I think this conversation was a relief to him as it meant he no longer needed to pretend. Had I been stronger I might have accused him of actually lying to me, which he clearly had, but I didn’t want to hurt him. I let it go. Once again, this was something that he needed to deal with himself.

  Not long after that I got an interview. It was with a company in South Melbourne called Integer Computing, across the road from the beautiful Albert Park. I went dressed to kill, wearing a chic beige jacket, with a thin belt emphasising my waist, and a tight knee-length Italian skirt with matching high-heels and handbag. My confidence grew as I noticed people stealing glances at me as I travelled to the office with Reza.

  After the interview I crossed the road to the park, where Reza stood waiting for me, smoking.

  ‘I got the job,’ I said casually. ‘Full time. I will earn $700 a fortnight. Isn’t that fantastic? Now we can find our own place.’

  Reza again said that he did not like the idea of his wife working.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘Now I will work, and then you will go to work. Don’t be sad.’

  Was he envious that I had found a job and he hadn’t? Whatever, while he voiced these objections to my working, he didn’t push them. He never seemed really serious about them and certainly never made any move to stop me. Surely he understood that we needed to have an income.

  We found a one-bedroom, ground-floor unfurnished apartment in Caroline Street, South Yarra, for $45 a week. The flat was small but that didn’t matter as all our belongings were in just two suitcases. It was carpeted, and had a nice little kitchen and a gas heater. It was perfect for what we needed.

  When we first moved in we really had nothing: no bedding, no fridge, no washing machine, no lounge furniture. We slept on the carpet, lying on a cloth that I had bought in India and under a quilt of beige satin with a floral design made up of minute fake pearls – a wedding gift from one of my rich aunts.

  On the Sunday after we moved in, Reza had gone out as usual and I was at home reading my Shariati books. I became bored so decided to go for a walk. We had only been in Australia for a few weeks or so and I was still unsure about finding my way around in this new city, but South Yarra felt safe enough. I walked through Fawkner Park and along Toorak Road near Punt Road. At one point I saw Reza and another man walking in the opposite direction on the other side of the road. Reza called out to me. ‘Where are you going? That is where the Australian prostitutes go’.

  I felt shocked and guilty, my mother’s words – ‘Don’t do something you have to apologise for’ – coming to mind. Perhaps it wasn’t safe, after all. I crossed the street and walked home with them, Reza behaving protectively and saying things that implied I shouldn’t be out walking alone anyway – that my place was at home. The other man he introduced as his friend Chris, who would visit our apartment from time to time in the coming months.

  After this episode I was left wondering whether Reza felt I was threatening his manhood. This would explain not only his protectiveness but also his resistance to my getting a job.

  After I started my job we quickly fell into a routine. I would leave early in the morning and go to the nearby milk bar to buy a small carton of milk to drink as my breakfast. Then I would catch a tram to work, waiting for it under an immense Moreton Bay fig tree that I still love to stand under today. When I got there I had to concentrate hard. The programming was much more demanding than anything I’d had to do at Helicopter Sazi. In this country, working for this private company, it seemed I would actually have to work! Thank God for a lovely lady called Jenny who helped me through. But I did get very tired by the end of the day. On the way home – often after dark, at six or seven o’clock – I would stop at the supermarket to buy the ingredients for a dinner to be cooked in the single pot I had bought. Our food was simple: lamb chops or burgers, plain vegetables, eggs or just sandwiches. I’d had no interest in cooking in Iran and in any case had not needed to as my mother cooked almost everything. Sometimes Reza waited for me outside the Integer office and we walked the two kilometres or so home together. Other times he was out when I arrived home. I wasn’t sure what he had been doing all day but there was no reason to be suspicious. All he seemed to do was read the newspaper. When he did get home we would sit down on a small rug over the carpet and eat what I had prepared.

  Our weekends and evenings were quiet. We had no television or radio or telephone. We might go for a walk in one of Melbourne’s parks but did not eat out or go to the cinema. Reza liked to be home. I would read my books. I was not interested in sex but if Reza was in the mood he would climb onto me and empty himself.

  The next morning I would go to work again. It was not much, but it was a start.

  I was married. I was in Australia. Our life together would build from here.

  9

  Pregnancy and inertia

  I hadn’t decided to have a child, but I hadn’t decided not to have one either.

  Reza and I didn’t have what you would call a sexual relationship. In truth there was no physical attraction between us. I had naively put this down to ‘honour’ on Reza’s part during our engagement but it did not develop after we were married. Our sexual encounters were rare, as Reza’s desire was always low and I never felt any inclination to take the initiative with him. When we did have intercourse, perhaps only twice a year, it was a purely mechanical exercise, much as I had seen my parents perform in the gloom of the Takht-e Tavoos basement.

  The virtual non-existence of a sex life was one reason why I was never very conscientious about taking the contraceptive pill, often forgetting to take it. That and the fact that, like my mother, I distrusted pills and medications generally. She did not believe in taking a tablet for any little pain or illness – it was like putting something foreign into your body. I developed the same philoso
phy. In addition, I didn’t believe the pill was completely reliable and in the back of my mind was something I’d heard about women not being able to have children at all after relying on contraceptives for many years.

  The thought of having a baby didn’t worry me. Somewhere in my mind I was resigned to it from the start. My mother had been pregnant 14 times so it was clearly the inevitable result of marriage. I was confident I could face anything. I had wanted to leave Iran and come to Australia, and I had made that happen. Surely I could deal with a child. I could deal with a hundred children!

  On the other hand we had only been married three months and in Australia for a few weeks, so it was a little daunting to learn in May, after I started getting nauseous and ill, that I was pregnant and due to have a child the following January.

  Most couples are either overjoyed at the news of a pregnancy, or they are shocked and horrified by the implications of an unwanted child. Reza’s reaction to the news was not much more than a shrug, which I took at face value. I was accustomed to his lack of emotion by now, and had long accepted that this trait, demonstrated so well during our courtship, was not going to disappear just because we were married. I felt a sense of excitement at the prospect of a baby, though I certainly hadn’t considered the ramifications – either positive or negative – of what was to come.

  During the early months of my pregnancy our routine continued as normal. I went to work and did the housework without complaint. Reza was always asleep when I left in the morning. What he did during the day I didn’t know and nor did I ask as, consistent with my upbringing, I didn’t feel it was my business to either ask or make any demand. I knew he wasn’t working and he showed no inclination to do so, but because I was working and we therefore had an income, I had no real concern. Reza and I didn’t talk much at all – but then we never had, right from our first meeting. Ours was just not a relationship that involved much interaction, either verbal or physical. He was not the type to compliment me on the way I looked; nor did he show any appreciation for the work I did to bring money in or for the work I did around the house. Occasionally he would object to the way I did some job around the house, or the way I prepared a meal, but that was rare as I was very careful not to do anything he would dislike. He would swear once in a while, but nothing like my father had – and I guess that was my basis for comparison. All of this was just his way, and it was my job to take the good with the bad. When we eventually started renting a television Reza would watch it until late at night – I was long asleep by the time he came to bed – so we spent even less time together.

  My morning sickness continued for a few months, sometimes well past the morning and sometimes all day. At times I felt my stomach and intestine were tangled up together. I couldn’t stand the smell of food cooking so would buy pizza or pasta at Pinocchio’s restaurant down the road. The thing I couldn’t stand most was the smell of Reza’s cigarette smoke. Unfortunately, he did not seem to care. Sometimes I quietly complained, pointing out how sick I felt; he would tell me I should go outside or to the kitchen, which I did if I could. As time went on I have to admit that this made me sad, but I was also encouraged by the thought that, once the baby arrived, he – like any father – would soften a little. Who could resist a newborn baby, especially if it was their own child?

  ~

  From the time I started work in Melbourne I put my pay into a joint bank account with Reza. I trusted that he would take full responsibility for the money as I didn’t have time to check the account or make any withdrawals. (In those days you still needed to go into a branch to do your banking, and bank opening hours were very limited.) And anyway, I had always felt that the job of looking after money belonged to the head of the household, who was obviously male. It never occurred to me that it would be any other way. I found it demeaning to talk about ‘my’ money or ‘your’ money, or to discuss who would pay for something. It was just ‘our’ money.

  I was earning a good salary but Reza, though home all day, rarely seemed to spend any money. I was surprised one day when Reza brought home two dark brown aluminium plates and cups. It was the first time he had shown interest in anything domestic. When we sat down to eat I thanked him and complimented him on his choice.

  He scowled. ‘You’re the donkey yourself,’ he said, which was a Persian way of saying that I shouldn’t mock him. Like saying ‘I’m not the donkey – you are.’

  His response surprised and upset me. I hadn’t been mocking him at all. Why was he so defensive? I closed up and said nothing more. We ate the rest of our meal in silence. He brought nothing else home and I became far more circumspect about complimenting him.

  One day I returned home to find a man called Jack Sutton with Reza. I already knew Jack. He was a real estate agent whose office was near mine, and we had met when Reza and I had enquired about houses to buy now that I was earning a steady salary. With a baby coming we would need a bigger place. I’d liked Jack immediately. He had a friendly smile and was very courteous to me.

  It turned out that Jack was also a part-time entrepreneur. He wanted to talk to us because he had read that there was great demand in Iran for good quality toiletry products like soaps, shampoos and toothpaste. Based on what I had heard from my mother, I had to agree. Sanctions on investment and banking, imposed by the USA after the revolution, had had indirect effects on many aspects of Iranian life, including the availability of many household items. Jack felt that the circumstances were right to successfully export toiletry products from Australia to Iran, but he didn’t have the time, or the right connections at the Iranian end, to take advantage of this opportunity. As we had arrived so recently, and as Reza wasn’t working, he asked us to join him in a business venture. Reza would act as Jack’s go-between to Iran. He wasn’t asking for any upfront money from us . . . and he would even call the business Sohila Australia!

  We agreed that we would help Jack if we could, and as a result saw quite a lot of him over the coming months. He became more important to us when we started falling behind with our rent. Despite my regular income, Reza became increasingly frugal. I had to press him to get enough for money for shopping and he would often make excuses about things being too expensive. We needed to spend less, he kept telling me. Sometimes I had trouble finding enough money for a tram ticket. And now he seemed to be holding money back from our real estate agent, complaining that the rent was too high. With my salary there should have been plenty of money for all our expenses, which were modest at worst, but somehow there wasn’t. I didn’t know why, and I was too tired and unwell with my pregnancy to care very much.

  When it became clear that we were not in a position to buy a house, Jack told us that he had a house in the new suburb of Chelsea Heights which we would be welcome to use. It was a three-bedroom brick veneer home that would give us a lot more room. It didn’t have any heating, but by now it was spring and I didn’t think that would be a problem. Jack was even willing to let us offset the rental payments against future income from our business partnership, and if everything worked out we could buy the house, the rental payments becoming loan repayments.

  So in November 1981, two months before our baby was due, we moved from South Yarra to Chelsea Heights: from one of Melbourne’s oldest suburbs to one of its newest. Oh, what a difference! Chelsea Heights was so recently developed that there were no trees or gardens anywhere – though there was a lot of dust. On windy days the dust would get into the house and through everything. This was a very different side of Melbourne, one which I had not seen before. Even so, it did feel a more realistic place to live than South Yarra for people like us.

  Chelsea Heights is over 30 kilometres from central Melbourne, near the main Frankston railway line. To get to work I would walk 20 or 30 minutes to the station then travel by train and tram to my office, which would take an hour. This would have been fine except that I was now six going on seven months pregnant, and the summer was warming up, so some of those trips were quite difficult.

>   ~

  Not long after we moved to Chelsea Heights I said to Reza one morning that I would like an electric kettle. I didn’t like to ask for anything but the stove-top kettle was very slow to boil on the electric elements. The next afternoon, after a long day of work and as I was preparing some food for us, I mentioned something about a kettle again. All of a sudden Reza stood up and walked out of the house, slamming the door behind him. An hour later he returned with an electric kettle, dropping it on the bench and saying, ‘Here it is. The kettle that you want.’

  Immediately I felt incredibly guilty. Why had I gone on so much about a stupid kettle? Now I had forced Reza to walk all the way to Chelsea and back to buy one. Why hadn’t I been satisfied with the stove-top kettle, which was perfectly fine? It took some days for this guilt to subside.

  That November was also my first Melbourne Cup Day. The race seemed to be a topic that Reza had some interest in. He even showed me the form guide and asked me which horse I thought would win. I glanced at the guide and immediately said number seven, my lucky number. Reza laughed at me. ‘Just A Dash is 15 to 1. It won’t win.’

  He told me he was going to the TAB to bet some money on the race. He had to explain to me that the TAB was a betting shop – we did not have anything like this in Iran. Later, we listened on the radio as Just A Dash won the 1981 Melbourne Cup. But Reza had not put any money on it.

  At the time this event seemed quite trivial. A bit of fun. I know now that variations of it play out across Melbourne, and even Australia, on the first Tuesday of every November. But from that day on I realised that whenever Reza was reading the newspaper, he was actually reading the form guide. I started to notice that, in fact, that was all he was ever looking at, and he would spend many hours doing so. From time to time my mind would flash back to other moments since we had arrived in Australia – right back to those first few days with Shakoor and Maria. It was always the same: Reza poring over the same pages: the pages of lists and columns. It was now so obvious that I couldn’t believe I had been so unaware. Like when you first notice a particular car, or a hairstyle, or a book, and suddenly that car or book or hairstyle is everywhere. Like Shariati had been for me back in Iran – invisible one day and inescapable the next. But you don’t see what you don’t know, and until that Melbourne Cup Day I simply had no concept of what was on those pages.